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If his doctor hadn’t retired 10 years ago, Wayne Lownsbrough might well be telling a tragically different story.

Instead, he is sitting in the cosy living room of his South Surrey home on a recent Sunday afternoon with Wendy, his wife of 40 years, and chatting about gratitude.

At 63, Wayne seems the picture of health and, aside from the usual ailments of aging and an issue with chronic high blood pressure, he will tell you he has had few serious complaints over the years. So when he found a new doctor a decade back, and when that new doctor ordered a battery of routine tests on him, everyone was shocked with the results.

Wayne was in renal failure.

“I said: ‘What?’ I didn’t feel anything. I felt fine.”

But he wasn’t fine. His kidneys were functioning at 30 per cent and while no one was sure just why, the doctors suspected it had something to do with the hypertension medication he had taken over the years.

Off he went to the specialists, who immediately put him on different meds and a stricter diet (no salt, for one thing) and gave him this prognosis: If his kidneys stabilized, he would be fine. If they worsened, well, they’d cross that bridge when they got to it.

The Lownsbroughs intuitively knew what was left unsaid. “We kind of had a feeling,” says Wayne, “that at some point it meant you either need dialysis or you’ll need a transplant.”

But he kept working, for the Richmond school district, and never missed his regular checkups at the St. Paul’s Hospital kidney clinic and then, in early 2010, he found himself overly tired. Tests showed an irregular heartbeat — arrhythmia — requiring a laser procedure called ablation.

It fixed the heart, but the kidneys weren’t fairing as well.

In the spring of 2011, tests showed they were functioning at 19 per cent. There was no question about it: At some point in the near future, he was going to need a transplant.

“They told me to start looking,” says Wayne. “To do a letter and send it out to family and friends. But how do you do that? How do you ask people to give you a kidney? And asking them puts them in an awkward position. I just couldn’t send that letter.”

Doctors also told the Lownsbroughs that a live donor was Wayne’s best option (a live-donor kidney tends to last longer than a kidney from a deceased donor) and that if he could avoid dialysis, his chances for successful transplantation were even better.

Both their kids — 32-year-old son Brad and 35-year-old daughter Kelly — were tested and matched, but Brad has some health issues that meant he was a bigger risk than Kelly. In a heartbeat, Kelly told her dad that her kidney was his.

Wendy, meanwhile, was also getting tested and after a few glitches (one test came back showing, incorrectly, that she had Hep C), everyone was surprised when she came up as a match as well.

A decision then had to be made, and Wendy made it. She would give one of her 60-year-old kidneys to her husband.

“I just told Kelly that I was older, and she hasn’t had kids yet, “ she says. “And I wanted to do it.”

Their doctors, who left the choice to the family, did tell them that if they used Kelly’s kidney and it failed after a few years, Wendy would then be too old to offer hers.

That’s all Wendy had to hear. The decision was made, and they were told that their case, spouse-to-spouse transplant, was relatively unusual.

Wayne says they didn’t really talk much about it after that. “I was thrilled, but it was hard to put it into words.” He worried, too, “about her health and I just wanted to ensure that she would be OK.”

Wendy has long dealt with a painful herniated disc that has bothered her for years, and bad knees that had required recent surgery. But her kidneys: they were good to go.

And so the process began. There were endless tests, and the couple spoke to countless specialists, and even a social worker (“I was asked if I was under coercion, or threat, or if I was being paid,” says Wendy. She was none of the above.)

The operation was booked, for July 2012, and Wendy had to start drinking more water and eating better to ensure her kidneys were working their best. But Wayne’s kidneys continued to fail, deteriorating to eight per cent capacity and, with dialysis a pressing reality, the surgery was rescheduled, to June 21.

Wayne and Wendy and their kids showed up on that Thursday morning before the doors of St. Paul’s had even opened. Wendy was prepped and went in first. The three-hour surgery, which involved laparoscopy and then an incision “to pop the kidney out,” as she says, went smoothly, and she was in recovery by noon.

Then it was Wayne’s turn.

And that’s when things got tricky.

With Wendy’s healthy kidney on standby awaiting transplant, St. Paul’s transplant surgeon Dr. Bill Gourlay opened up Wayne (the new kidney was to be placed near the groin on Wayne’s right side; his two “native” failing kidneys were to remain untouched) and found something he hadn’t been prepared for: enlarged lymph nodes, a sign of lymphoma, or blood cancer. A sample was immediately sent out for analysis. It came back positive.

And that, says Wayne, presented the transplant team with a dilemma. “Do they put the good kidney in, knowing there is possibly another serious health issue. Because had they known, they wouldn’t have done the transplant.”

They put it in. And Wayne’s new kidney — his wife’s kidney — worked like charm.

Wendy didn’t see Wayne until the next day, when he was finally out of recovery. “I kept asking all night, ‘Where is he? How is he?’

“I was just coming out of the anesthetic when the kids told me about the lymphoma. We were so excited to do this and then this happens. Lymphoma. It was like a black hole.”

More tests were done on Wayne and then came word that the lymphoma was slow-moving, a good thing. Wendy went home after four days, Wayne after eight. And, said their doctors, their case was so unusual it would be presented for discussion at an upcoming cancer conference.

The Lownsbroughs are a statistic of another kind, among the 306 record-setting organ transplants that took place in 2012 in B.C. That number included 16 heart, 25 lung and 65 liver. Wendy’s kidney, being one of 83 from a living donor, was among the 194 transplanted kidneys.

Wayne was fortunate — he had four people offer to give him a kidney — but the B.C. Transplant Society also reported this week that there are about 480 people on transplant waiting lists right now in B.C., and last year, 18 people in this province died while waiting for a life-saving organ.

Wayne and Wendy know they are lucky. He didn’t need dialysis, and both are them are doing just fine with just one kidney.

And while the couple, now both retired, is more attuned to their health and diet these days, they will also tell you that recovery these past months has been a rough road. Wayne had to return to hospital a few weeks after the transplant to deal with a reaction to the various drugs he now requires. He has to avoid beer, and the sun. And visits to the kidney clinic, though not as frequent, are still a regular must.

Like many who go through such things, they have become experts on their bodies and the health care system, reeling off the names of procedures, equipment, medications and, of course, the many terrific medical experts who took them through the process, from their family doctor to the kidney specialists, nutritionists, cancer specialists, pharmacists, hematologists, surgeons and renal clinic staff who have been so much a part of their lives over the past few years.

On March 12 last year, a few months before the transplant, the couple gave each other new rings to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary because, Wendy says, “we didn’t know what the future was holding for us.”

Today, Wayne looks forward to playing golf again, and taking his wife to New York. And he looks at her with something that speaks to a new-found emotion, a sweet mix of love and relief, of gratitude and pride.

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